Thank you for the support this past year-and-a-half! I've had a lot of fun writing this blog, but I'd like to add a sustainable fashion element to my writing, because, like a magpie, 1. I love pretty, shiny, sparkly things, and 2. I'm learning about ways to shop and collect them in a sustainable, non-harmful-to-the-planet way (which, if you think about it, is also similar to a magpie, too), things like this thrifted Alice and Olivia sparkly shrug above (thrifted from Bring 'N Buy Too in Danbury, CT).

I'm excited to share my passion for pretty things and the planet and what I'm learning about balancing these passions with others.

I'll be continuing at The Misadventures of Me. This blog will stay live for a while as I move necessary content over and set up links to old essays.

Look for more photos of pretty, shiny, sparkly things but otherwise just as much writing on similar topics: movies, feminism, current events, and, most of all, the environment and sustainable fashion.

Please follow us there and on Instagram @IsabellaMDavid as I partake in a 30 Day No Shopping (for nonessentials) challenge. xxIzzy

Day 2 of my no-shopping/ shopping from my closet challenge, and no need not to feel fabulous while raking up all the leaves in our country home, don't you think? My husband's company gave him an apartment in Philadelphia, so I'll be blogging from both locations for the foreseeable future. Hooray for an interesting mix of country and city life! As in this half-thrifted outfit, pleather pants and collar necklace are both Free People but the top is thrifted from Williamsburg and the Frye boots are so old at this point they might as well be listed as thrifted :). You can find second-hand Frye boots in excellent shape at the thrift shop with the blue awning on 1st Ave and 13th Street in the East Village, NYC.In my last post about women objectifying themselves, I stumbled over articulating the notion of the self-possessed vs. the self-obsessed. Men are taught to have self-esteem, I claimed, and women are taught, at best, self esteem. I didn't feel satisfied with this glib play on words, and so I spent the rest of the week thinking about what I meant.

Part of those ruminations culminated in an essay on the poet Paul Celan, language, and the selfie, which will (fingers crossed) be published soon, edited by the brilliant Camille Griep, who, incidentally, has her first novel Letters to Zell about to appear in real book form! Squee for talented friends!! Now that is an accomplishment to celebrate with many a book-cover-self selfie!

On this blog, however, I have no editor but have to rely on my own muddled ability to articulate what I mean. So what do I mean about women eschewing the real self for a selfie self, and why does that dichotomy parallel the masculine/ feminine?

Let me backtrack. Last week, no doubt manipulated by massive hype, my poor, pop-culture-soaked psyche yearned to see Selfie, the new ABC sitcom (or as my husband and I, spoiled by AMC and HBO, dub them oh-so-cleverly "shitcoms"). It didn't disappoint... our low expectations that is. Now, there were elements I liked about the show. The hero had a bunch of great lines, and I liked him. But the heroine. Oh, the heroine! Despite having over 200,000 followers on social media, she was a broke, lowly sales associate to his wealthy corner office executive. Instead of translating thousands of followers into a lucrative self-starting selfie business like Chiara Ferragni of The Blonde Salad or Betty Autier of Le Blog de Betty or... a million other examples of young women translating fashion sense and beauty into bookoo bucks, Eliza Dooley (clearly a play on Eliza Doolittle's name as will become apparent when I get to the sitcom's plot in a second) is barely getting by, got dumped in the first few minutes by an obnoxious married man, and then (oh no she didn't!!!) had a clumsy accident on a plane (why, Hollywood, must all heroines be hopeless, pitiful klutzes??) and instead of brushing off the incident, felt she'd humiliated herself.

Cut to the next scene.

"I was hoping the whole company had forgotten about my epic fail," a voiceover states as her cruel co-workers giggle behind their hands, clearly remembering, and being assholes about it. Well, Eliza is self-centered we've been told, so they aren't the assholes (although, personally, I think they are). Of course, or so the shitcom world posits, Eliza is the one deserving to be publicly ridiculed and demeaned, not only because she dared to throw up on an airplane and mess up her pretty shoes but because she posts sexually explicit photographs-- i.e. she dares to revel in her own loveliness. Um, no. I don't accept this storyline.

Originally, based on what I'd gathered from the hype, I thought the show was going to be about a cold, successful shark of a woman, whose social media success hasn't translated to great people skills in real life, a woman who hires the hero to help her out. I thought she had agency in crafting her own self. Foolish me. Instead, we get yet another dumbed-down version of Pygmalion, Shaw's play upon which the much inferior My Fair Lady was based.

Wait! Did I lose you? Don't get me wrong! I could sing "I have often walked on this street before" a million times more than even "Let It Go", and I have a 20-month-old, so we sing that song a lot. But, as an adult, watching Eliza Doolittle end up with that sneering jackass Henry Higgins is horribly, horribly painful to watch. The movie ends as Eliza penitently returns despite his ill treatment. Henry puts his feet up on the grate (sorry for the spoiler) and demands she fetch his slippers, and then there's this happy fadeaway music, while I'm left boiling over with rage, just imagining what I would do to that man if I could get my hands on him.

In Pygmalion, Shaw understood the sexual and the professional relationship cannot be mixed salubriously. Now as a little girl I wanted Eliza to end up with her daddy...er Henry Higgins. As an adult, I preferred Shaw's more realistic ending. Henry sets Eliza and Freddy up with a business and continues to be all avuncular, happy to have the young people in his life, much like Shaw himself adopted the real-life mess of an actress Molly Tompkins and her husband and chided and pushed and encouraged and taught her how to be a passably good actress and continued to be her friend, himself spurning her most likely mercenary advances later on in his life. (You can read the full post about "Letters to a Young Actress" here). Like Henry and Eliza, there was a huge age divide between Molly and Shaw, but Shaw, brilliant artist that he was, never gave in to that sort of silly fantasizing called (disgustingly and untruthfully) "romance" by Hollywood. Someone in a superior position can never be the true lover of someone in an inferior position. Love is between equals.

I myself, between my supremely self-confident ex-boyfriend/ current best friend and my husband dated a plethora of these teaching types and felt incapable of falling in love with any of them, because they didn't seem confident enough to have a deep self of their own. How can you fall in love, operative word is fall, into a shallow puddle? There's a certain kind of insecure male, who needs to feel in charge that way. That's exactly why feminism is a fight both genders need to be invested in as Emma Watson brilliantly and recently articulated in her UN Women speech.

Strictly-defined gender roles hurt both genders. Men don't feel comfortable letting down their guard and being with an equal, because they feel like they have to be he-man strong, and a lot of women feel like they have to pretend to be weak, cooing acolytes, basically lesser versions of themselves, in order to keep these frightened men from feeling frightened. No one, neither men or women, are well-served.

You want to know what is romantic? Being yourself, and being with someone who appreciates that, and whose real self you appreciate learning about. Of course you change, but you change as you grow together the way the briar and the rose do at the end of Barbara Allen over Sweet William's grave. Okay, that romance didn't end that well, but the world wasn't ready yet for a strong, independent, earth-striding Barbara Allen.

I think we are now.

And we don't need another Eliza Dooley, doofus extraodinaire, looking for another douchebag savior to teach her how to behave the way he wants her to. We need to tell Barbara Allen she doesn't have to die any longer, so Sweet William can live. And Sweet William/ Henry/ ABC show creators and every other insecure macho man the world over needs to get the eff over himself already! You're not gods, even if you were created in His image. Or whatever. Men made that story up, too.

What do you think? Have you see the show? Do you think I'm way-off? Do you think Eliza's obnoxiousness excuses Henry Higg's criticisms and interferences? Do you think her behavior is that inappropriate? Or, have you met men who've tried to change you/ teach you and so also feel antagonistic towards these sort of supposedly altruistic characters?

"Pretty hurts," Beyonce wails from a glitzy music video world. It's a world void of ebola scares or rampant fears of Harry-Potter-loving Isis thugs, lured from off the internet. (I swear that was a segment I saw on CNN last week at the gym. Beware, Harry Potter fans!) The music video is self-consciously silly, the run of the mill rubbish you get from a pop star: mixed messages, faux-seriousness and sex, sex, sex, (and did I mention sex?), but, what interested me personally, is that the song itself is surprisingly heartfelt with nuggets of wisdom embedded in the fishing-for-compliments nature of the whole beast. Perhaps that's because it wasn't written by Yoncé, a pop star but by Sia, a songwriter, but, of course, the medium is the message, and things get distorted fast in Pop Princess land. Here, watch it, and then we'll talk.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love Queen B. I love her SO MUCH. I love her curves and how she flaunts them instead of hiding them and how that helps me accept my own curves. I love her smoky voice. I love her killer dance moves. I'm not attacking her in this piece per se, but what perplexes me is the sheer shamelessness, the almost-Wonderland-worthy nonsense packed into this one video.

Granted, it's a mixed message so common throughout the media, it's usually almost invisible, and by that I mean, we take it for granted that celebrities say one thing and do another. In this case though, the words and images are in such utter juxtaposition that for once, they present a unique opportunity. It's that message I want to unpack. And I know that's a terribly pretentious term, and one should only unpack one's suitcase, but in this convoluted case, I think it's actually apt.

So here's the message, as I gather it, if you mix the song and the images:

"Don't be obsessed with your looks, girls, but your looks are all that matter about you."

What's interesting in this case is how deeply ironic this video is-- the literal and stated truths are exact opposites-- but, again, this kind of "thinkspeak" is not unique to this video, just more extreme in this case.

"Pretty hurts," Beyoncé wails as she smashes her beauty queen trophies, looking fine as hell in a bedazzled Dolce & Gabbana corset and acid-washed jorts, her dyed blonde locks tumbling in sexy disarray around her sculpted, bronzed shoulders. The message of the song is clearly that perfection is illusory and unattainable, and the search for it is soul-sucking, self-destructive, and, in Virginia Woolf's parlance, "hoxes" women. (It's a racing term Virginia Woolf used to describe the ways in which societal expectations cause women to cut (or have their) achilles tendon cut for them right out of the gate.) But.

But.

Beyoncé's video undermines this message, or, rather, it undermines Sia's message or Sia's meaning. Because Bey IS impossibly perfect, achingly beautiful, and dressed to the nines throughout the video. The song was introduced to me, in fact, by a friend who's very concerned about her appearance and USES THIS SONG (because of this video) TO FUEL HER GYM WORKOUTS, a.k.a. her own painful search for an impossible perfection. I love the song, but I have a hard time reconciling it with the glamorous selfie that is a Beyoncé video. (Gosh, it does sound like I'm attacking her, but I'm really not. I think Beyoncé is one of the most talented dancers and singers and one of the most beautiful women in the world. There I said it for the last time! But... that doesn't mean I can't expect her, or at least wish for her, to practice what she preaches.) For example, I think it would have been a lot more exciting if this video ended with Bey makeup-free, maybe with glasses on or something, getting a library book out of a real, physical library, reading a poem by Audre Lorde like this one "Woman Speaks" with a freeze-frame closeup on these next-to last lines:

I have been womanfor a long timebeware my smileI am treacherous with old magic

Then makeup-free and proud, Beyoncé could look up at the screen defiantly and flash that inimitable smile and SING (paraphrasing another poem here by Robert Hayden), thereby inspiring scores of selfie-obsessed teen girls to put their phones down and pick up a book of poems. Or a philosophy book. Or anything but another tube of lipstick, a highlight kit, a diet book, a new dress, or any of the things this video made me want to purchase.

Of course, it's a complicated issue.

To self-promote or not to self-promote. I'm as guilty as anyone else of taking my own picture, hoping to highlight my activities with a pic of me in a theater costume or wearing that magical shade of red lip stain the gods of Sephora created, so someone will read my long, ramblings essays on here. And as far as sins go, it's a pretty venial, forgivable sin. I'm not attacking myself or anyone else, or even Beyoncé for glorying in her pretty face, but what I'm questioning, I think, is the NEED to do it. Why does being pretty matter so much? It won't make anyone love you, never mind what the media say. I can't tell you how many pretty girls I met while modeling who didn't have a single real friend. According to actual statistics, pretty women tend to be less high status and accorded less respect. So, excuse me as I get highfalutingly metaphorical here, so why are we women all lemming-like dashing ourselves on the pretty rocks below, battling to be at the forefront of the crowd, hurtling over into the abyss of perfection? Or, perhaps the metaphor I'm looking for is rather a reverse one: we aren't physically jumping over the side, instead we're ripping our hearts out through our chests like that guru in the second Indiana Jones movie and throwing our "selves" away. That's what we're doing, and what I think Sia is saying, when we obsess about ourselves as "things", "objects".

"Oh, you pretty thing," some man said to me recently, and I felt a sick, sinking sensation. Lest, I seem to be humble-bragging, I'll include a photo from that night (below). I was tired, makeup-free, and not looking particularly pretty but very happy to be out with dear friends, eating good food-- butter-soaked corn bread, kale salads farmed fresh to table, ribs dripping with sauce and flavor. I was not seeking compliments in any way, and I was surprised how this stranger's perception of me made me feel diminished and self-conscious, as if anything I had to say was unimportant or secondary to my looks. While I do enjoy wearing Sephora's magical red lip stain from time to time and shiny, glittery shoes (as anyone knows who follows me on Instagram), I don't want to define myself by trinkets or feel defined by them. Unlike my friend who fuels her workouts with the concept "Pretty Hurts", happily, ever since experiencing the metamorphosis of having a baby, I no longer feel a compulsion to be "pretty", although I still enjoy pretty things. However, I no longer think of myself as one of those "things" is what I'm saying-- I'm a body through and through, and there's a world of difference. Ceasing to objectify yourself in the face of the pressure to do so is the ultimate liberation for a woman. Colette thought that ultimate liberation was "to be rid of the pain of loving", but I think, nowadays with the ubiquity of glossy celebrity images, it's to be rid of that overwhelming, obsessive urge to objectify ourselves. For me, it's been the most liberating aspect of becoming a mother, but I think it's a crying shame, I wasted so many years yoked to an illusory ideal, and it saddens me to think of my daughter growing up similarly yoking her concept of her self to her selfies. It also makes me nervous about approaching the acting world again, now that my baby is getting older, and I have more freedom. Will I slide back under the yoke, faced with all that pressure to be impossibly thin, young, shiny, and miserable?

Yes and no. Perhaps I will worry one day again about whether or not I have cellulite or a pimple, but, according to a Zen saying, "Before enlightenment, I chopped wood and drew water. After enlightenment, I chopped wood and drew water." Those thoughts may come, but I think there are certain harrowing experiences-- I'll spare you all the details-- that change a person fundamentally. It's just too bad that it took nearly dying to liberate me. Every day I'm simply happy to be alive, and while I'm as self-critical as anyone else, the thoughts don't pierce me to the core the way they used to or dominate my inner monologue in any way.

In her Jezebel article "Selfies Aren't Empowering, They're a Cry for Help", which you can read here, Erin Gloria Ryan makes a brilliant point: what selfies tend to self-promote is only a passive prettiness-- i.e. a Beyoncé video or some other version of pouting perfection-- and not a girl next to a diploma or a girl next to a chemistry set or a girl next to an illustration or some other achievement she just wrought. While boys are taught to self-promote and learn assertiveness, girls are actually taught to self promote (I'm suggesting a subtle difference) and taught passivity. However, in a culture that rewards prettiness in a myriad of ways, not least of which are followers on social media, how can we regain our sense that the conversation begins with an inner monologue-- self to self and not outside oneself, as in a selfie to follower?

In "A Woman Speaks", Audre Lorde writes, "I seek no favor... I have been woman for a long time."

When I lived in Brooklyn about a year ago, on my way home I would pass a large, unprepossing apartment building on the corner of Prospect Park West and 1st Street. There, beside a sliver of garden behind the building, nearly daily I'd find small moving boxes filled with giveaway books. In this way, I acquired way more books than one human being could read in a lifetime, or rather, enough books that a building-full of human beings apparently read, among them a beautiful, leatherbound edition of Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, a book on eating disorders masquerading as beauty detoxes, which I previously blogged about here, as well as countless other more forgettable titles. I also picked up a hardback copy of To a Young Actress-- George Bernard Shaw's letters to a silly American actress, a supposed acolyte of his ethics and world philosophy, although I think she was more attracted to his fame and he more interested in her youth and silliness than her small talent.

More important, in some ways, she was a woman who reminded me, in her flaky interest in ALL of the arts at once, more than a little bit of myself.

I'm not sure who my book benefactor was--if it was just one person or many who left their gorgeous editions out like that in the same spot every week between the garden and the townhouses that line 1st street-- but I like imagining that a hoary, old gentleman passed them along (except for The Beauty Detox Diet-- not even as fanciful as I am, can I quite picture that.) In my imaginings, this gruff, no-nonsense, but dripping with the milk of human kindness, old man is not too dissimilar from George Bernard Shaw himself, who was thirty years senior to silly, sweet Molly Tompkins. I also like to think that the lessons my mysterious benefactor's books imparted to me were as personally meant as George's letters to Molly, filled though the letters were with an odd mixture of fatherly advice and unfatherly flirting.

I only finally sat down about a week ago to read the book, just one of many on a long summer-reading list which included Just Kids by Patti Smith (a quick read at the end of May), all of A Song of Ice and Fire (May and June), Middlemarch (July and part of August), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (two or three days in August), The House at Belle Fontaine (another day in August although I haven't finished all the gorgeous stories yet, because I don't want to the book to end), and fittingly, Labor Day (yesterday). All great reads. To a Young Actress wasn't. Molly's letters weren't included, having been lost on Shaw's end, and her son made the odd decision of publishing many of the letters without including a type-written version. Beautiful though Shaw's writing might be, it was also frequently illegible.

However, parts of the letters were, unsurprisingly, considering this is Shaw's letters we are talking about, electrifyingly good. What stayed with me the most about To a Young Actress over this past week, was Shaw's more practical advice. More than even his odd admonishment that Molly should learn to write letters beautifully in a literal not figurative sense, inspiring the fluff-brained girl to take secretarial classes (not what Shaw meant), or his heavy, obsessive emphasis on the importance of beautiful elocution, what struck me was his description of acting as a muscular exercise. Getting those emotions to translate from your own mouth across a crowded theater space was the work of practice, not perfect talent, or so Shaw claimed.

It's good advice, and words I have found to be true in one way or another, so far, of all the arts I've dabbled in: drawing, modeling, acting, and, most of all, writing. Even keeping this blog on a weekly basis improved my writing in the sense that ideas flowed faster, grueling sentence constructions untangled themselves easier, and the act of writing a 1,000 word essay became the work of hours not days or weeks. But at the beginning of the summer, I wanted to take a break, not just from this blog but from writing. An agent was interested in a proposal I'd written about an incomplete YA novel, and I sent the MS out anyway, unpolished and unready. Then I suffered endless pangs of shame and dissatisfaction. My head ached; I couldn't think very clearly. I just sensed something felt very off, and I decided I would need to do a lot of thinking and exploring before I could figure out what that was.

I think there's a voice within all of us that tells us when our foot is on the edge of an abyss; many of us choose to ignore this voice for various reasons: greed, fear, curiosity, love. I know whenever I have not heeded that voice, I've made the dumbest mistakes of my life. Sometimes, it's because I'm not sure what it's saying, this voice I'm hearing in my own head and not outside myself, thankfully. That voice was warning me now, but, because of one thing and another-- grief over my aunt's sudden death, a move to a new town, motherhood-- it was almost as if the voice was too far away, left back behind in Brooklyn, forgotten in a box, and I couldn't make out the words from the great distance between us. Cheesy as it might sound, I knew I had to find my way back to myself. I owed it to myself, but I also owe that to my baby.

Being a mother has changed me as it never changed Molly Tompkins, whom Shaw deemed such a bad mother, he practically begged her to send her son away to a boarding school. Equilibrium is the least of what I owe my child, so this time I decided to step back and take a break until I could figure out where to safely put my feet next. I decided to do some acting again while I considered what I wanted to do with my writing, because acting has always given me a lot of energy-- the excitement of putting on lipstick and pounding the pavement, looking for work, making new connections, meeting odd new characters to people my stories later or sometimes, even better, a new friend. Then, it happened again. I shot a short film, and the work wasn't good. I played that mythical character that with my naturally sulky expression I've been frequently typecast as-- a femme fatale-- and I could barely muster up the muted enthusiasm required to pout and seduce. This time the voice clamored inside me, shrieking and moaning like a ghost haunting my head. I felt deflated. Miserable. Unable to act or to write, which to me is pretty much equivalent of a deep depression. A day spent without creating something, even something as simple as a pretty dish of strawberries and tortillas, is a flat day

"What? What is wrong?" I wanted to ask but couldn't obviously. It's very hard to have a conversation with yourself unless you're genuinely crazy, which, unfortunately for me, I'm not. Answers weren't going to be that easy. So, I read. I cared for my baby. I cleaned my house. I tried to learn to cook (also for my baby's sake.) I watched a lot of Desperate Housewives, a surprisingly clever show, which I developed a cockamamie theory about. I believe people denigrate the show, because it largely concerns issues interesting to women and not to men-- childcare, aging in an ageist society, relationships, family, balancing careers, navigating female friendships. A Happy Event, also available now on Netflix, is a French film, with a brilliant take on this dichotomy of the typically male versus female experience, pointing out that what men choose to think about is considered "deep", "unique", and "important", while what women have no choice but to think about, because it is occurring within their own female body is "silly", "predictable", and, therefore, "uninteresting". That show and that movie were as important to me this summer as reading the iconic Middlemarch was, because they all gave me permission to take my own small travails seriously. In Middlemarch, among other brilliant character portraits, Eliot paints the picture of a craven intellectual too frightened to ever do anything, to put his work out there, because at all costs he must preserve his image of himself as a misunderstood genius. In the process, he never does anything at all, let alone anything great. "Most men live lives of quiet desperation," is a Thoreau quote that's always puzzled me. I've always just done things, and I never realized before that that is enough.

I thought I also had to win acclaim. I didn't realize how heroic it is to simply manage to gather up the minutes of your day and make a daisy chain of them.

Like Molly Tompkins, a mother who threw up a somewhat brilliant acting career for a somewhat brilliant painting career, I'm still searching for the answers, but I know one of them after this summer. When you are an artist, whether you are trying to convey someone else's words to an audience or your own words to yourself, what matters is that the work is good, simply so that your mind is clear, that you can hear the working of your heart or soul or talent or whatever you call it. That is the daisy chain of my days.This is a personal insight I don't believe I would have arrived at if I hadn't dabbled in acting again this summer, and maybe that is why I personally need acting and writing both. It seems to complete the two halves of myself so that they can have an intelligible conversation. If I hadn't started the summer doing terrible work in a terrible short film and ended it doing hard and good work in a beautiful play, I don't know if I would have arrived at this insight-- what matters, above all else, is doing good work. "Art teaches us what it means to be human," is a sentiment my friend Rosalind Jana of Clothes, Cameras, and Coffee (see the link on my blogroll) quoted in one of her own latest and greatest blog entries here. Maybe, like young Molly, I will never be really brilliant at any particular field, master of none and dilettante of many, or maybe like wise, old George, I won't care about that, because I'll know, "We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than we have to consume wealth without producing it."

When I pursue good work, I pursue happiness. What brings you happiness? Do you always heed that inner voice? Why do you think it's so difficult sometimes to make the right decisions? I'd love to hear about your own difficulties making time for the things that make you happy and what those things are in the comments below. What is your daisy chain made out of :)? Speaking of shooting short films, below is a brilliant and very short film I got to work on this summer, one night in Brooklyn under the famous bridge. It ended up winning honorable mention at the CFC Film Festival in Hollywood and my co-star, the great Artan Telqiu, was nominated for Best Dramatic Actor. Also, see the poster below for information on the play I'm currently working on and will be appearing in through the month of September. The photos above are from Food Porn 3 for the NYC Food Film Fest at the Loew's Theater in Manhattan, a music video for Tora Fisher in which I get to play an acrobat and met some brilliant burlesque queens, and the play I'm currently working on at The Ridgefield Theater Barn in Connecticut, just an hour from NYC.Thanks!Izzy

It seems only fitting that I should start up my blog again after visiting Storm King with the artist Glen Farley and his girlfriend and muse Jodi E., considering his interview and their work together was the last thing I posted here before taking a long, much-needed internet break.

Here are some dry facts about Storm King, what you'll get from a Google search. It's a world-renowned outdoor sculpture park about an hour from New York City in the Hudson River Valley, and it's been around for about fifty years. I'd never heard of it before, but Glen and Jodi learned about it after watching a documentary on the British sculptor and photographer Andy Goldsworthy. A lot of his work is environmentalist site-specific sculpture and land art, and there is a famous wall there that Jodi and Glen wanted to go look at. The wall was winding and strange, and, in my opinion, the best part about it was its odd name, which I believe was "Seventeen Days, Five Men, Five Boulders".

But of course words, as is the case so often in the plastic arts, don't do the work or the space justice. You have to see it to experience it, and it's very much worth the day trip from New York. There are green forests and mountains with ridiculous, sad, and lovely names like Shunnemonk Mountain, names that speak tragically of the mostly vanished Lenni Lenape people of the region. There are sculptures made out of giant pieces of cedar, rough and hewn like obdurate cliff faces but redolent of the smell of pine forests. Gentle hills close upon the horizon and then open up to reveal new spaces, so that before you know it you've walked into an entirely different section of the park, huge feet and broken hands scattered across the grass and flowers like some gutted god left to rot in peace in the park.

Elsewhere the vista opens up and there are endless carpets of flowers, broken only by the hard angles of steel and metal sculpture, welded in some faroff studio and shipped by mysterious means to this wide-open field. We went on a holiday weekend, and so the vista was also broken up by endless tourists, standing (just as we were) idiotically in front of instead of facing the sculptures, waving to absent friends in endless snapshots that will probably not do the artwork justice just as ours didn't (but we had fun being silly nevertheless. I particularly love this hipster meets Norman Rockwell shot I obtained of Jodi and Glen right before the famous Goldsworthy wall).

But there are also moonlit tours on offer and bike rentals for making your way around the more distant pathways, none of which is particularly steep. Either way, by moonlight or in the Autumn when the leaves are a burning panoply of colors across the mountains of the vanished Lenni Lenape (and perhaps the sight will explain why they dubbed their mountain Shunnemonk, or an "excellent fireplace"), I'd like to go back and just quietly look without any thought of who might look at me, looking at it.

Links

1. For more information on Storm King, check out their website here or this excellent article in Vogue that closely mirrored our impression as a group, especially when it cites the sculptor Zhang Huan's work as a respite from all the modernism on display. Despite posing in front of his three-legged Buddha like the silly tourists we were that day, we also agreed he was our favorite artist in the park. At least that visit he was... We'll definitely all be going back!

The German poet Goethe once said "People should talk less and draw more." With that injunction in mind, I decided to let the art of my very good friend, Glen Farley, speak for itself with these beautiful paintings and these short, koan-type answers to my questions.

When did you know you wanted to be an artist? A painter? I never knew, it is just the way I am and have always been. As a child I was always getting in trouble at school for covering every page of my schoolbooks with drawings or for drawing portraits and landscapes during class instead of paying attention.

Did any artists inspire you before you began? Not really. Like I said, I had begun drawing and painting as a small child before I was aware of any artists or even of the idea of an artist as a distinct type of person. However, when I was maybe 7 or 8 I remember being very inspired by a artist / carpenter who my father had hired to create a large stain glass window to adorn a cabin he had built in the Adirondacks.

Which artists inspire you the most now? Kirchner inspires me more than any other artist, but I am also very fond of Klimt, Gauguin, and Utamaro.

What else inspires a painting? People? Things? Places? Everything and anyone really - the color of the sky as it gets dark, the pulsing red coals of a campfire, the sound of the leaves flickering in the wind, the painful sadness expressed in a stranger's eyes, the delapidated and ruined factories along the Hudson River that are being pulled back into the Earth by vines and trees.

Do you find it hard to make time to paint? No, just the opposite. I have to remind myself to do other things beside painting, like eating, reading and spending time with the people I love

Could you talk about a specific painting and maybe something you discovered while painting it? About the painting, or about art, or about yourself? I am not sure that the answer to this type of question could be communicated in prose.

Why do you love painting? It connects me to the beautiful and the mysterious. Whenever I am not painting regularly, I feel as though I am only half alive, a stranger to myself who is merely watching life pass by without actually living it.

Below is a clip of Henry Miller reading from his book To Paint is To Love Again. Like me he liked to spend the time he wasn't writing drawing, or in his case painting watercolors. In this clip he talks about how friendship is more important to the development of an artist than money or anything else. It's good stuff. Have a listen....

I read you. Finally. And yes, you're stinking fantastic, just like "they" all say. And yes, this is probably news to no one but me. I who resisted for years, who fought the good fight. I cede the battle. Babe, you win.

So I'd see her books and hot waves of shame would wash through me. I'd hastily put her book back, sandwiched between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Fa'iz El-Ghusein. Just joking. Barnes and Noble doesn't carry too many of those there Muslim writers. (Yes, I know El-Ghusein is a martyred Armenian writer. Mostly, I know this because I just Googled "writers whose name begins with E" in order to make up (an increasingly not funny) joke.

And on a side note: really, Wikipedia? Eisenhower is the best you can do under authors whose name begins with "Ei". I mean Deborah Eisenberg, one of the foremost short story literary talents of our day isn't even listed, but Ike is. What the hell did Ike write anyway?

The hot waves of shame were, are real though, not something I conjured for the sake of this ambling anecdote about my lifelong, one-sided duel. You see, once upon a time in a land far, far away, I ran into Deborah's boyfriend. At least he was her boyfriend at the time, or so the gossip went. And come to think of it, oddly enough the rest of this will read like a Deborah Eisenberg anecdote, although it is all also entirely true.

It was the inconceivable guy himself. In the flesh. You can also Google that, "the inconceivable guy", and Vizzini a.k.a. Wallace Shawn will pop up, attached for life to that phrase. Oh, how thrilled he must have been about that. I think that's how we, in the smallish town, referred to him, too, as that inconceivable guy.

Nobody knew his real name, but everybody knew Deborah was dating him. I don't really know how, but rumor and gossip has a way of flying around a smallish town. And Charlottesville was still a smallish town in those days, and Deborah was one of its luminaries, teaching at the university. So people talked. And I listened, because OH MY GOD did I love The Princess Bride.

You've seen it. Of course you have. But have you ever read The Princess Bride? I have, and it does not-a end-a the way you might-a think it ends. Stick with the movie. The book is not exactly a fairy tale. It's much, much darker, although fairy tales can be dark, but not the Disney, cleaned-up kind we've all gotten used to.

The book is all about this one lesson: Life is pain. It's a casual, throwaway line in the movie, just one more in a world of wit, but in the book, it's the heart of the whole story. There is no happy ending. Not in the book. I read that book when I was eight, and in some ways it is probably why I'm a writer today. I read that book for the first time in maybe one sitting. In the book, the Peter Falk character you see in the movie is this omniscient, interrupting narrator, telling stories about his own life, a book within the book, and most of the stories are about what the pretend book The Princess Bride meant to him, how it taught HIM the lesson that life is pain, and anyone who tries to tell you different is trying to sell you something, and by the time I was done with the book, I had learned the lesson, too.

I stayed up all night after being denied my happy ending, and oh my God did I cry and cry and cry. I couldn't unread what I'd read. Inigo's wound reopens. Fezzik gets lost. The prince could be heard in the distance in hot pursuit, coming ever closer, and then the book within the book ends. On that miserable note. And the omniscient narrator points out that even if they got away, Buttercup would eventually lose her looks, some young punk would eventually best Wesley, etc. There is no "happy ending". Things just end.

William Goldman, you owe me back a night of my young life that should have been spent dreaming of pretty princesses embraced by perfect pirates.

Easy, happy endings gnawed at me from that moment on. I could detect the salesman posing as a storyteller, and I was not content. (By the way Deborah Eisenberg is the real thing; she's no salesman.) Anyway, back then, when I ran into Deborah's Inconceivable Prince, I didn't read "living writers". I still liked fairy tales, or at the very least what I vaguely thought of as "olden times" language. I hadn't read Deborah, but I had seen The Princess Bride, and the movie was happy and shiny and beautiful and funny enough to almost make me forget that lesson William Goldman seared on my young brain, late one night towards the end of my innocent childhood.

And then I was standing in line on the Downtown Mall, having an ordinary day, being all fabulous and teenagery. (Probably not so fabulous though in retrospect, what with the acne I suffered from and thought I could cover up with yellowish concealer "to cancel out the red spots!" You see what I mean about the salesmen and the pain?) And there he was in front of me in line, in the flesh, VIZZINI! The Sicilian. And I did it, the thing that still sends hot waves of shame and made me avoid Deborah Eisenberg's books even though the edition of her short stories that I saw in Barnes and Noble was thick and beautiful with those cut, ragged pages that always make me think of Gatsby's libraries and all the uncut pages of his books for some reason.

And I said (I actually really said), "Oh my God, are you that guy who says 'inconceivable' in Princess Bride?" And Oh my God, he smiled at me so sweetly. I was really still a child then-- I've always been emotionally behind everyone else, and at 18 I was like a twelve-year-old in many ways, and he must have sensed that, the poor guy, so he admitted that yes he was "that guy" without sneering at me or otherwise rightfully putting me in my place. And then I think I... oh God, oh God... I ASKED HIM TO SAY IT. (You know what I mean.) And I think he did, although the later shame obscured some of the details from this memory. And then he got his pizza slice or whatever and ambled down the Downtown Mall without once biting my head off or otherwise shaming me, which I turned out to be more than capable of doing myself. Because then it's like I came out of this dream-state, and I realized what I'd done, and again, another phase of my life was over, marked by the pain brought to bear through the medium of my favorite book/ movie.

And I declared to myself that henceforth ye shall never read Deborah Eisenberg or see any of Wallace Shawn's fine works in Clueless or Manhattan for then ye shall be reminded ye are an idiot and dieth of the shame.

So it came to pass that it wasn't until I took out The O. Henry Prize Stories for 2013 and read all of them except Deborah's and almost returned it without reading her story, and then (because I am afflicted with OCD among my other problems like talking to myself in old-timey tongues) had to read her story, too, and was so blown away by how beautiful and funny and cool a writer she is that it blew away all the hot waves of shame as well (or most of them).

And forsooth, I shall verily read lots more of her works. And ye should, too.

By the way Deborah uses the word "whilst" in a very amusing way, so if you also have a prejudice against living writers and a preference for "old-timey talk" you'll be like totally covered. The quote in the blog title, while suffering from a lack of "thous" and "thees" in my humble opinion, is a brilliant line from Eisenberg's miraculously good short story "Your Duck is My Duck". And P.S. It tied for my favorite along with Kelly Link's "The Summer People" in the O. Henry book, but all the stories are pretty damn fantastic. Have you read them yet? Which were your favorites? Why?

So it's that time of year again. The time of year where I try (and this time hopefully) do not fail to grow my bangs out in anticipation of the hot weather and sweaty, gritty locks in my eyes, driving me insane. Hence the hippie headgear. My daughter is also in the same bandwagon, since cutting her hair consisted of taking one swift pass with the scissors while she wasn't looking, and so now she' got to wear a floppy, enormous (although enormously) cute ribbon on her head, and I've got to wear anything that will keep my #$% hair out of my eyes.

Well, I don't have deeper thoughts than that to pass on about the cyclical and oh so cruel nature of hair-growing and cutting in the world of bangs. On to another subject and one of my favorites: old clothes and snobs.

Above, I'm wearing a thrifted dress from Beacon's Closet in Brooklyn-- the one near the Barclays Center just off Flatbush (oh, how I miss you, all of you!). The dress is originally from TopShop and was like new when I got it, although it will not remain so. I have fallen in love with the ease and prettiness (not to mention the covers-up-my-pasty-legginess) of the maxi dress. Particularly, this pretty, floaty one above, and I will be wearing it like a sartorial, security blanket this summer.

And today in fact I was tempted by the siren call of the maxi dress, tempted into the chic confines of an actual, real, full-price shop by a maxi dress on a headless mannequin (what is up with those? They're creepy, not modern. Creepy.). My patient but bored husband chatted with the saleslady and mentioned (to the saleslady), who looked as if she had not only ironed her blouse before wearing it but herself had been recently ironed and starched then dipped in self-tanner and inverted into a peroxide tank, that I didn't think much of the shopping in Connecticut. My husband didn't realize what I meant by that is the thrifting. I do not think much of the thrifting.

(Although I have found one great consignment store in my small town, which I accidentally lumped into the same category as "thrift", my favorite category: the treasure-hunt land of The Thrift. The proprietress of the consignment store was horrified when I said I was there, because I was a "thrifting queen." I had to apologize and explain and backtrack and smooth ruffled feathers galore.)

"I love consignment, too," I had to say, although I don't really, It's much more expensive, and where's the fun in that, paying nearly full price for treasure, instead of pouncing, x-marks-the spot style on a brand-new Michael Kors tweed jacket with the tags still dangling in a Goodwill.

Anyway, this full-price saleslady today was also offended by my husband's careless words.

"But there's a lot of great shopping here!" The full-price boutique lady meant in Connecticut, which was cute. (God, I sound like a snob myself, granted a snob of old-clothes shopping, but I lived in the Mecca of old clothes (and clothes period) for nearly ten years, so I know of what I preach.)

And I guess there is some good shopping, if you like that sort of thing-- preppy white jeans and Tory Burch logos galore and those large, chunky necklaces older ladies like to wear. Not really my type of thing. But I tried to smooth ruffled feathers again.

"Oh, I know, there is! I just found this great consignment store in town."

Instead of smoothing, my words made her bristle. In fact, her lip curled. It curled! She sneered at me! Like a full-on villainous, King Joffrey trying to make Tyrion kneel in obeisance sneer.

It made me realize that I'm very glad I'm keeping this little, and little-read blog about the joy I take in OLD CLOTHES. I could wear new, shiny things at this point in my life. I don't have to thrift, but shopping makes me feel superficial and selfish, just basically bad about myself and sad for the planet, like I'm just another shark who will die if it stops circling. There's this whole ravenous thing to "keeping up with the Kardashians" is what I mean by the clunky shark metaphor. So I choose to wear old clothes, and they're just as pretty (if you take some time and know where to shop, which I do, so follow me/ email me if you're interested in the NYC scoop, or the Connecticut one as well.)

Today, sweet, little naive Brooklynite that I am, I discovered there are still people in this world who look down on thrifting. It floored me. Let's put aesthetic opinions and considerations aside for the moment, but there are a lot of convincing arguments to thrift. I've written about this before, but we're sending so many old clothes to Africa, it's destroying their local economies. That's not even my main issue with fashion, although it's bad enough. I lived in Soho for six years (which is like getting a Ph.D. in twits), and there I witnessed the epicenter of greed.

The lightning-speed with which fashions changed, changed me. I could not see it as a harmless, self-indulgent past time anymore the way a writer I admire very much, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, describes it in this article for Elle "Why Can't Smart Women Like Fashion?" And I see her point and even whole-heartedly agree with her. Why can't smart women dress up? I mean, obviously, I agree with her on that as I keep this blog about old, pretty junk, and I also feel vaguely embarrassed about it, like it's something a little shameful to admit to... I like pretty, pretty dresses.. shhhhh. But... at the same time, I think Miss Adichie is as incredibly naive in this piece as I was today, telling a woman of the Stepford housewife ilk that I love to thrift.

Because, Miss Adichie, what I already knew and forgot and remembered today is that fashion isn't just about pretty dresses; it's about power, and power, like in any chess game, is expressed through constantly trumping all others, and in this case by wearing the LATEST, the TRENDIEST, the MOST EXPENSIVE, FLASHIEST item: fur (oh yes, lots and lots of fur), logos made of children's pinky bones, ostrich-leather heels, blood diamonds. "They" don't care who suffered or how much or why as long as they look IT. The It Girl. Miss Exclusive, wearing what no one else has yet but will soon be mass-produced at a Target near you. I mean, I don't think "they"'re actually villainous; I think "they" simply choose not to think about it in their frenzy to win, to be the most fashionable, to have the most fans. It isn't about looking pretty. It's about looking priceless, perfect, envied. It's about power.

Who I mean by "they" are the kind of people who sneer if you're wearing last season's Marc Jacobs ballet flats. These people, the Gwyneth Paltrows with their aspirational Goops, their $500 t-shirts, fuel this sick, ever-increasingly swift cycle that in turn fuels the overproduction of clothing, the poisoning of our oceans, our lands.

Speaking of which, have you heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? It's a real thing. A whole island of garbage almost as large as the continental United States. Google it and you'll see the most terrifying images, the other uglier face of fashion-- and of course, not just fashion, a whole ethos of consumption.

My sister, a scientist and an environmentalist, told me about the Patch the other day. I was discussing how horrified I was by reports that they couldn't pinpoint Flight 370's debris field, because there was so much trash in the Indian Ocean.

"No way," I said.

"Oh yes," she said. "Google it."

I did.

"No," I said again.

"It's mostly plastic bottles."

"Good God, would you look at that? And no one cares."

"Lots of people care."

"I don't think so. I wish that were true."

"I care," she said.

And she did. She does. She really does; her whole life and work is devoted to saving our planet, no irony or intention to beguile more Instagram fans in that simple desire. There are superheroes among us... That's my definition of an It Girl.

Well, I wasn't going to write much, so I'll end it there. I'm no superhero or It Girl. I'm an ordinary person-- I mean I bought that maxi dress from the sneering, starched lady. (Sigh. I really do love maxi dresses, and I don't have the energy for shaving my legs every day and also feeding a picky toddler three meals, one or the other.) I'm no hero. But I love old things and hope to inspire others to try thrifting, if they want to feel not only pretty but smart in both senses of the word. And as you can see from those pictures, I felt really beautiful in that old dress.

From 1-month to a year & so fast! Happy birthday to my little girl, off to her first day of daycare,looking so grown up!

What is culture? It’s not as idle or ingenuous a question as it first appears. It’s a vitally important question. But let me back up. Last night, an unpleasant incident happily inspired some pleasant thoughts. I was going to write a blog post this week about an entirely different subject, but then I witnessed an elderly woman and a grocery store clerk having a verbal kefuffle, and I wanted to write about that instead. Well, not about that precisely, I want to write about what culture means to me in 1,000 words or less, but I have to arrive at the answer sideways, partially because there is no one, easy answer. Although on the other hand, perhaps the meaning of life can be encapsulated that easily; maybe it is all about how important it is to enjoy the little things lest you behave like either of those two idiots did, both two very unhappy people for very different reasons. The clerk, or Idiot A, was a college student and ought to have known better than to speak in that way to a woman who could have been his grandmother, or in this case Idiot B. The grandmother really had no reason to be upset initially, not until the clerk began to speak to her in embarrassingly abusive language. Still, she did initiate the fight and over nothing, simply because he opened up the express lane and took some customers, who were behind her in line, ahead of her. But she was a woman aching for a fight; I could see it written like words in the lines of her tired, unhappy face. “You have too many items for the express lane,” the student/ clerk/ Idiot A at first patiently explained to Idiot B, when she began to throw her fit. “But not if I have this!” She brandished some arcane object whose use I could not begin to guess at or describe to you. It looked like some kind of scanner, but how it was attached to her person I can’t even begin to arrive at. “Well, I didn’t know you had that,” the clerk sniped, obviously irritated by her total lack of proportion. “You should have asked. That’s what you’re supposed to do.” Her voice quavered with italics and self-righteous indignation. Meanwhile, I was praying my own clerk would hurry up scanning my items, so I could escape the crosshairs. “This is for express items anyway!” He snapped back. “You have too many items.” Oh, it was on. “A simple apology would have sufficed,” the grandmother added in an irrationally hurt tone. “That’s all I was looking for. A simple apology. I want a simple apology!” So I obliged. “Well, I’m sorry. I should be done soon. I really shouldn’t go grocery-shopping after the gym.” I indicated the huge pile of snack items I was purchasing. My feeble joke fell on deaf ears. The woman latched onto my apology for all the wrong reasons. “You don’t have to say you’re sorry. You haven’t done anything wrong. Do you hear me?” she said, turning back to her foe. “I would like an apology.” “I have ears. Of course, I can hear you,” the clerk snapped at the end of his patience. From there, the situation devolved; insults were traded. He refused to show the unctuous respect she liked in her underlings, and she threatened to have him sacked. I helped bag my own groceries and skedaddled out of that toxic atmosphere as quickly as I could, taking a deep breath as I emerged into the parking lot. Neither of them had been willing to concede a single point, to let any little thing go. They were both obviously unhappy people—the clerk hated his job, he openly scoffed in a faux-childish Will Ferrell way when she threatened to have him fired— and the grandmother seemed permanently petulant for whatever reason, maybe simply the habit of a long life. Anyway right there, I think that’s why culture is important. I lived in the suburbs once before, and I was miserable. I hadn’t found my passion yet, and then I lived in the city and was happy, but it was a draining sort of happiness. I was always running around to one party or café or bar or shopping expedition or a reading or a play or an opera or museum or picnic with friends or symphony in the park or gig. It was exhilarating, but I wouldn’t say I was precisely happy either. Perhaps finding a quiet place of joy within yourself is the only way to be happy, a source fed by many quiet streams; some can manage it in the city, but it can be difficult to find that centering calm among so many competing noises. I remember hearing Grace Coddington, an art director for Vogue, say once that she was always on the lookout for inspiration, always taking in sights that might make for backdrops or ideas for the fantastical worlds she helps create. Recently, I went to see the poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips reading from The Ground his luminous book of poems (mostly about New York), and I was struck by his extraordinary presence and the way his poetry changed that semi-sterile, ugly library room, constructed in the horrible 70s, into an open-air bazaar. Whether it’s painting or poetry or fashion-styling or playing the trumpet, it’s so important to cultivate the centered place of joy and concentrated thought, removed as far as can be from commerce or anything outside yourself like the end result of fame or money. I mean, making money from your art is nice, but I’m talking about something else—a nourishing state of mind. For example, just before I left New York, I ran into a mother from my birthing class around the block. “How can you leave New York? Don’t you want to expose your child to all this culture?” Her hand swept out, encompassing a fire hydrant and a Toyota minivan. It struck me as specious, this sudden use of the word “culture” to ascribe the value she placed on living in Brooklyn. In all my interactions with this mother, she’d never once mentioned a book she was reading, a poem that had inspired her as a child, a painting that the Park Slope scenery reminded her of, a photographer whose pictures made her happy or sad or thoughtful, or even another language she’d studied because she liked the round, warm sound of its vowels. I wanted to tell her the world culture, means cultivating yourself from within, that it’s a modern concept based on a term first used in classical antiquity by the Roman oratorCicero: "cultura animi" (cultivation of the soul). It doesn’t mean staring at a painting and then going to have a burger and forgetting you ever saw the painting until you tag yourself on Facebook standing in front of it, or watching someone else playing a clarinet, while maintaining a loud conversation about life insurance (what that mother did talk to me about). It certainly doesn’t mean being able to list the poets you’ve read or paintings you’ve looked at like they’re Garbage Kid cards you’ve collected in a Cabbage Patch kid bag (an early hobby of mine) or the adult equivalent—name-dropping.

"Oh Audre Lorde? She's a black Lesbian poet." (Mind you, that's an actual quote from a thinking New York person about one of my favorite poets in a list of other "cool" poets.)

"Yes, but how do her poems make you feel? What is your connection to them?"

(I'm now imagining this part of the conversation, the deep intellectual name-dropper squinting at me, maybe a little pityingly.)

"Feel? They're... um... well... you see. That's not the point. Audre Lorde is a Lesbian who wrote political poems in the 1970s."

"Yes, you said that."

"Oh, don't be mushy! Who cares!" And then before you know it, you're arguing about a five-minute wait and looking vaguely unhappy all the time as if always squinting at the horizon, trying to find the oasis in the midst of the desert of you life. It’s what you do with your experience of the painting or the trumpet that counts. But of course, that’s not the sort of thing you can go around saying without risking getting punched in the nose. Anyway, I don’t want to preach. I’m merely observing the world, and I like what I see wherever I am in the suburbs, the country, or the city: people interacting, characters emerging, a story waiting to be told …

P.S. In other news, you may or may not have heard that LG is planning to deface the beautiful Palisades, where, when I did live in New York, I spent a lot of time and personally can attest to the fact that not only do they look gorgeous from far away but are just as wonderful up close and personal. (My ex-boyfriend was a rock-climber and used to drag my unhappy, unwilling carcass all over them. We remain friends who work better with a little distance-- the rocks and the man. That is all I have to say). Please help preserve them and take a mere second of your day to sign the change.org petition here or read about the issue in the New York Times here.

Isabella David McCaffrey

Currently, I'm living in a little yellow house in the countryside just outside New York City. I blog about the things I love here. For more on my published work, please visit my website www.IsabellaDavid.com. Photo credit: Rinz VanBrug